Social Protection and Rights of Migrant Populations

Social protection and the rights of migrant populations encompass the legal, institutional and social measures designed to ensure that migrants—whether regular, irregular or in transit—can access basic welfare services, labour protections and justice systems. This field spans questions of entitlement, administrative discretion and the interplay between national regulations and transnational legal frameworks. It examines how eligibility rules, communication practices and organisational intermediaries shape migrants’ ability to secure housing, healthcare, education and income support. Research highlights the role of legal status in stratifying access to benefits, the influence of street-level decision-makers on everyday experiences of justice, and the capacity of migrant-led associations to offset state exclusion. A growing emphasis on multi-scalar comparisons has revealed how divergent policy environments and local implementation practices produce markedly different outcomes for similar groups of migrants. The global significance of this enquiry lies in its capacity to inform more inclusive welfare models, refine conditionality regimes and strengthen the rights architecture for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have employed comparative realist methods to deepen understanding of material deprivation among migrants excluded from formal welfare systems. One multi-country analysis of low-income undocumented families in the UK, Portugal and Norway has demonstrated how national welfare architectures and social contexts interact to shape experiences of food poverty. By layering household, community and policy-level data, researchers uncovered both methodological innovations in multi-tiered study design and concrete insights into how extreme precarity forces undocumented parents into varied coping strategies. This work underscores the importance of situating social protection research within broader socio-economic crises and reveals how normative exclusions are sustained or challenged across different European welfare regimes.

Social Protection and Rights of Migrant Populations publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in social protection and rights of migrant populations across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Legal status: The formal immigration category that determines a migrant’s eligibility for rights and services under national and international law.

Street-level bureaucrats: Frontline public officials who make discretionary decisions affecting migrants’ access to welfare, often in one-on-one interactions.

Undocumented migrants: Individuals residing in a host country without valid authorisation, thereby lacking entitlement to many state-provided social protections.

Conditionality: Policy frameworks that tie access to social benefits to meeting specified requirements, such as employment, cooperation with return procedures or proof of self-sufficiency.

References

1. Experiences of food poverty among undocumented parents with children in three European countries: a multi-level research strategy. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
2. Legal status and refugees' perceptions of institutional justice: The role of communication quality. Public Administration Review (2024).
3. Migrant organisations, belonging and social protection. The role of migrant organisations in migrants' social risk‐averting strategies. International Migration (2022).